Posts Tagged ‘Ubisoft Art Framework’

Painted in watercolour and written in verse, Child of Light is a charming, if superficially childish, fairytale RPG. Beneath this breezy fable of lost princesses and talking mice, however, is a complicated combat system that calls back to Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battles – a dense interplay of buffs, interrupts and attacks that injects a realtime element to otherwise turnbased fights. You might call it a platformer too, but given that the heroine quickly sprouts wings, your exploration of the sidescrolling overworld is more aerobatic than acrobatic. I like all these things and yet it’s left me struggling to be enthused. Here’s wot I think.

The one good thing about uPlay misplacing my save file several hours into Child of Light is that it helped bring my feelings about the game into sharper focus. One feeling being a reluctance to play more of it than I really needed to. Another being that, since I had to, I’d have preferred the cutscenes to be skippable.

Now that John is on sabbatical, where will RPS turn when they need someone who understands emotions? Child of Light is about a young girl exploring a twinkling world of wonder and danger, and probably its story will require descriptors like “tender” and “heartfelt”. The rest of us aren’t equipped to deal with such things. Case in point: the plinky-plonky video tour of the game’s world, Lemuria, which can be found below. I’m too scared to watch it myself, but I showed it to Adam and he hasn’t stopped screaming since. He seems so confused and angry.